Ho led the way back through the window out to the fire escape and then to the girl’s apartment. Over in a corner of the bedroom was a fine sprinkle of plaster dust on the floor near the baseboard.
Gabby was the one who got it first. He moved a mirror back out of the way. Behind it was a neat little hole in the plaster and the diaphragm of a dictograph.
That point established, we returned to the other apartment.
“The receiving end of the installation is in here,” Fanston continued; “also, the bloody bedclothes are in here. You can figure what that means. Having put up that dictograph, with the receiving end in this apartment, they’re naturally due to come back to watch it — if you fellows haven’t messed things up so that you’ve scared away the quarry we’re after.”
Suddenly I remembered something. Without waiting to explain my hunch, I hurried out of the room.
I walked down the long corridor, looking at numbers on the doors. I found the apartment I wanted down at the far end of the corridor. The place was dark and silent. The hallway had that peculiar clammy feel which clings to crowded apartment houses along toward morning. A dog yapped once, then quit.
I gently turned the doorknob. When I felt that the latch was free I pushed tentatively against the door.
The door was jerked open from the inside. Before I could let loose, I was thrown off balance and came stumbling on into the room.
A man’s voice said, “All right — you asked for this.”
It was dark in the room, with just the faint hint of distant lights seeping through the windows.
They had fed me enough carrots and vitamins to improve my night vision and taught me enough about rough-and-tumble fighting in the dark, so that what came next didn’t bother me at all. It was just like going through a training routine.
I knew a blackjack was swinging for my head somewhere in the darkness. I sidestepped, felt a swish of air as something whizzed past where my head had been, saw a dark object in front of me, and, somewhat off balance, figured out where his bread basket would be, and hit him where he was thickest.
I felt surprised muscles collapsing beneath the force of my blow, heard a whoosh as the breath went out of him.
Someone cursed behind me. A flame split the darkness wide open. I could feel the hot breath of burning gunpowder against my cheek. I never did hear the bullet crash. My ears were numbed by the sound, but I whirled and struck out with my left.
It was then the knee gave way. I went down in a heap. But they’d taught me all about that in the Army too. I caught the man’s knees as I went down. He struck at my head in the dark with the gun barrel and missed by a couple of inches. I grabbed for his wrists and didn’t connect. He kicked me in the shin and broke loose.
There was a quarter second of silence. I realized then he had enough light to show him where I was. He was going to shoot.
I flung myself into a quick roll, kicking as I came over. My heel grazed against his knee. A dog was barking frenziedly.
I heard running steps in the corridor. The beam of a flashlight danced around the opening of the door. There were scrambling steps, someone barking an order, a back door opening, and a pell-mell of stampeding feet running down a staircase.
The two officers went storming past me, following the beam of the flashlight. I saw Gabby’s long arms raise the window, saw him slide matter-of-factly out to the edge of the sill, and heard him say, “All right, boys. That’ll be enough. Stick up your hands.”
The windowpane above him split into fragments of glass as two bullets crashed through.
I saw Gabby’s arm swing the automatic.
“You all right, Jay?” he asked.
I rolled over on my hands and knees and started getting up. The knee felt weak, the way a thumb feels when you’ve bent it all the way back and all the strength is gone out of it; but I could hobble along all right.
“Okay,” I said.
I went into the bedroom. Before I found the light switch, I could see two long rolls of something stretched out on the bed. Then I found the switch and clicked on illumination.
They were tied up in sheets, their lips taped shut. Two pair of eyes looked up at me — large expressive dark eyes and big blue eyes.
I reached over and tried pulling off the tape from their lips. I held the side of Lorraine’s cheek, got a good hold on the tape, and gave it a quick jerk.
“Hurt?” I asked.
She looked up at me. “Not much.”
I went around the bed to Muriel, worked a corner loose, and then gave her the same treatment.
“You would have to do it the hard way!” she flared.
I started untying sheets.
From the outer room I heard Inspector Fanston saying in an odd voice, “Good Lord! How did you do it, shooting in the dark? Knocking the legs out from under them.”
Gabby didn’t even bother to answer the question. He said, “Listen, Inspector, this is purely civilian, see? We don’t figure in it at all. We’re just witnesses who happened to be in an apartment in the building. Here’s a number. Call this number and make a report. They’ll tell you what to do. As far as you know, it’s a gang of housebreakers that had headquarters here. You even keep the railroad angle out of it. Get me?”
I waited, expecting to hear Fanston ask Gabby who the hell he thought he was. But, instead, Fanston’s voice sounded meek and subdued. I knew then the shield in the leather case Gabby was carrying in his pocket was big stuff.
The Inspector said, “I get you. Smitty, go out in the hallway and get those people back where they belong. Tell them there may be more shooting. And don’t let anyone talk with the prisoners.”
I heard the whir of a telephone and Inspector Fanston’s voice saying “Police Headquarters,” then Muriel Comley saying, “Leave that sheet where it is. All I’ve got on is underwear.” Her eyes went past me to the doorway and softened. “Oh, hello, Gabby!”
Gabby said, “We can stay right here until things quiet down, and then you can go and—”
“Not in this room,” Lorraine said.
“What’s the matter with it?” Gabby asked.
I looked at Lorraine’s eyes, got up and walked across to the closet door, opened it a few inches, and then hastily pushed it shut.
Gabby took one look at my face and knew the answer.
“Oh, Fanston,” he said, “the body you’re looking for is in here.”
Over a breakfast of ham, eggs, and coffee, Gabby told us as much as he ever told us.
“For a long time,” he said, “we’d been running into a peculiar type of trouble. Machinery would be tested and double-tested. It would be put aboard freight cars, shipped to various Army camps, and tested when it got there. Everything would be all right, but after a while, usually under the stress of combat, the machinery would suddenly go haywire. Part of it we found was due to the old familiar sabotage of putting a little acid on critical metal parts, and then carefully covering up the slight discoloration.
“But the other part of it had us completely baffled. A machine would get into combat and suddenly fail. Later on, we’d postmortem, and find sugar had been introduced into the gasoline. You know what that does to an internal combustion motor.
“After a while we found out that all the machinery with which we had this trouble had come through the yards in this city, but that in itself didn’t seem to mean anything, because the machinery was tested on arrival at destination and everything was seemingly all right. But we still kept coming back to the peculiar coincidence that our troubles came only with stuff that went through these freight yards.